As the current cycle of E-rate funding comes to a close, it’s time for school districts to turn an eye toward what’s coming next.

Fortunately, we now have some clarity on what the next few years will look like. Until December 2019, districts were a bit in the dark, left to wonder what rules the federal government would adopt to govern discounts and budgets going forward. But now that the regulations are clear, school districts can use them to guide their next five years of networking investments.

Here are three steps that school districts should take now to get ready for the next round of E-rate funding.

How do you plan for your network to accommodate an influx of work from home traffic? This is a question on a lot of network managers’ minds right now. Many organizations are busy keeping their networks up and running, making sure they have the right capacity, issuing notebooks, etc. And while they’re busy addressing these initial needs, they may not be thinking about the underlying infrastructure needed for increased WFH activity. What if you send all 10,000 people home — do you have the right capacity to support that? This blog will cover what should be top of mind when planning for your organization’s network to scale for WFH.

As recently as 2017, INRIX Research found that U.S drivers spent an average of 17 hours looking for parking. And when they’re searching for spots, they’re part of a bigger problem: pollution. An important way to curb carbon emissions from cars is by getting them off the road — and into parking spaces — more efficiently, and state and local governments are considering intelligent parking solutions to help.

Through a mix of devices, flexible furniture and audiovisual solutions, today’s classroom environment puts students at the center of their own learning. But if a school’s back-end infrastructure, culture and budget can’t support the addition of new technologies, these improvements will have limited impact.

In this blog post, we explore five common obstacles to deploying modern learning environments, and discuss how your school can move past them.

Organizations have long understood the importance of securing their supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) networks and industrial control systems (ICS) from outside threats.

In recent years, these systems have become increasingly interconnected with IT systems and IoT networks, enabling organizations to take advantage of greater automation and better data analytics. But these improvements make connected systems a bigger target for cybercriminals. Here are three measures organizations should take to assess — and improve — the security measures surrounding their SCADA systems.

Only a few years ago, it seemed most educators still needed convincing that video games had any role to play at academic institutions. By now, many educators have come to understand the benefits of esports, but they lack staff with experience in implementing esports programs.

To make matters more complicated, there’s no one “right” way to design an esports initiative. After all, needs vary by size and goals. Find out how other K–12 schools, colleges and universities rolled out their programs, and get inspired to start your own.